Pravda on Gonzales:
...He has never stopped being consigliere to Mr. Bush’s imperial presidency. If anyone, outside Mr. Bush’s rapidly shrinking circle of enablers, still had doubts about that, the events of last week should have erased them.
First, there was Mr. Gonzales’s lame op-ed article in USA Today trying to defend the obviously politically motivated firing of eight United States attorneys, which he dismissed as an “overblown personnel matter.” Then his inspector general exposed the way the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been abusing yet another unnecessary new power that Mr. Gonzales helped wring out of the Republican-dominated Congress in the name of fighting terrorism.
The F.B.I. has been using powers it obtained under the Patriot Act to get financial, business and telephone records of Americans by issuing tens of thousands of “national security letters,” a euphemism for warrants that are issued without any judicial review or avenue of appeal. The administration said that, as with many powers it has arrogated since the 9/11 attacks, this radical change was essential to fast and nimble antiterrorism efforts, and it promised to police the use of the letters carefully.
But like so many of the administration’s promises, this one evaporated before the ink on those letters could dry. The F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, admitted Friday that his agency had used the new powers improperly.
Mr. Gonzales does not directly run the F.B.I., but it is part of his department and has clearly gotten the message that promises (and civil rights) are meant to be broken.
It was Mr. Gonzales, after all, who repeatedly defended Mr. Bush’s decision to authorize warrantless eavesdropping on Americans’ international calls and e-mail. He was an eager public champion of the absurd notion that as commander in chief during a time of war, Mr. Bush can ignore laws that he thinks get in his way. Mr. Gonzales was disdainful of any attempt by Congress to examine the spying program, let alone control it.
The attorney general helped formulate and later defended the policies that repudiated the Geneva Conventions in the war against terror, and that sanctioned the use of kidnapping, secret detentions, abuse and torture. He has been central to the administration’s assault on the courts, which he recently said had no right to judge national security policies, and on the constitutional separation of powers.
His Justice Department has abandoned its duties as guardian of election integrity and voting rights. It approved a Georgia photo-ID law that a federal judge later likened to a poll tax, a case in which Mr. Gonzales’s political team overrode the objections of the department’s professional staff.
The Justice Department has been shamefully indifferent to complaints of voter suppression aimed at minority voters. But it has managed to find the time to sue a group of black political leaders in Mississippi for discriminating against white voters.
We opposed Mr. Gonzales’s nomination as attorney general. His résumé was weak, centered around producing legal briefs for Mr. Bush that assured him that the law said what he wanted it to say. More than anyone in the administration, except perhaps Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Gonzales symbolizes Mr. Bush’s disdain for the separation of powers, civil liberties and the rule of law.
On Thursday, Senator Arlen Specter, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, hinted very obliquely that perhaps Mr. Gonzales’s time was up. We’re not going to be oblique. Mr. Bush should dismiss Mr. Gonzales and finally appoint an attorney general who will use the job to enforce the law and defend the Constitution.
In the context of Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton, that last line is grimly hilarious. They don't need no steenkin' Constitution.
Which brings us to Democracy on Steroids, in the 51st state:
...So let us ask again: is Israeli democracy in danger? This democracy is young, evolving, and certainly not indestructible. For a while it has been showing clear signs of strain; not least, the inability to maintain reasonable political stability amid the frequent turnovers of ministers and administrations. Now it is showing even clearer signs of deep crisis. According to every survey and poll, levels of popular confidence in the system have never been so low. People are turning their backs on politics as never before. Indeed, the very violence with which the public is pouncing on every falling public figure is a sign of how deep the anger runs. The present void might well encourage those who promise a radical cleansing of the Augean stables in return for a different kind of political rule – and is it such a stretch of the imagination to see them succeeding?[via Empire Burlesque]
Two figures, indeed, have already been making such a pitch, and should therefore be listened to carefully. Both, probably not coincidentally, are Russian immigrants – and thus even less wed to the Israeli democratic tradition, such as it is. One is a minister in the current Israeli government, Avigdor Lieberman, a self-proclaimed “strong man” with an abiding hatred of the legal system (and a few brushes with it in his past) who has already put forth a suggestion to turn Israel into more of a presidential system with few restraints on the chief executive (as Ben Lynfield reported in the Nation, Dec. 26th 2006). Lieberman’s popularity keeps going up even as that of the political system falls. But in terms of being the most authentic symptom of how deep the malaise goes, as well as having the greater potential to change the rules of the game, Lieberman pales in comparison to a man who chose this same past week to announce his own arrival on the political scene: Arkadi Gaydamak.
Gaydamak is a Russian born billionaire who owes his wealth in part to shady arms dealings in Angola that led the French to issue arrest warrants for illegal arms dealings and money laundering. Having successfully fended off extradition to France, the oligarch has turned his attention in recent years to philanthropic work in Israel, with a keen interest on using it to create a public image for himself. When it turned out during the 2006 Lebanon war that the government was ineffective in caring for the civilian population under missile attacks in the north of Israel, Gaydamak stepped into the void and set up a ‘tent city’ on the Mediterranean beach for refugees, thus becoming Israel’s most popular public figure at precisely the moment the political class was experiencing its greatest failure. No less dramatically – and Gaydamak has nothing if not a flair for dramatic public relations – when Sderot, a small town near the border with Gaza that is home to Minister of Defense Amir Peretz, was showered with Kassam missiles in the fall of 2006 and Peretz and his colleagues in government were wringing their hands, Gaydamak sent buses to take several thousand inhabitants for a vacation at the Red Sea. Peretz’s angry reaction to this public gesture only underscored how impotent the establishment looked by comparison to this philanthropist with his bottomless pockets.
A couple of days ago Gaydamak announced, in a lavishly organized event, the foundation of a new political party called “Social Justice.” At a moment when all other politicians are seen as guilty, at least by association, for sticking their hand in the till (or somewhere else where it does not belong), the founder of “Social Justice” is the gift that keeps on giving, rather than taking. Gaydamak does not want to enter politics himself – or so he says. Indeed, he cannot even speak Hebrew – his speeches are all translated. What Gaydamak wants, and says almost explicitly, is to use his money to become the king maker of Israeli politics: he wants to choose singlehandedly the next Israeli prime minister. And based on current polls, his ambitions cannot be set aside lightly. But if Gaydamak is convinced that the Israeli electorate is for sale, and if the voters are willing to prove him right; and if this transaction is now happening in the public eye, and met with more applause than dismay; then the problem is not one of the political class alone. Israeli democracy is in severe crisis: the friends of the Jewish state should be mobilizing post-haste to help Israeli citizens, jaded, disappointed and angry as they might be, ensure it is not a fatal one.
Steroids? At home and abroad, the name of the game is Rome on crack, as crime families move in to offer Protection. Our Entertainment Tonite government has moved from 24 to The Sopranos, and according to People, the ratings are smashing.
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